Burkhard Stangl, Kai Fagaschinski

Burkhard Stangl and Kai Fagaschinski both are masters at fluidly combining melodicism and abstraction. Musik-Ein Porträt in Sehnsucht showcases their work as a duo, carefully composed pieces intertwined with judiciously placed field recordings and meticulously sequenced to create a record that is more than the sum of its parts. Stangl and Fagaschinski first met in the summer of 2002, when Christof Kurzmann suggested Kai should join the ensemble performing Stangl's opera Venusmond in Berlin. They clicked both musically and personally and decided to work as a duo in the future, with their initial concert being part of the mammoth AMPLIFY 2004: Addition festival. Over the next three years, they sporadically worked together, playing two concerts in Vienna and one in NYC (in the ErstQuake 3 festival), and in 2007, recorded Musik-Ein Porträt in Sehnsucht in two separate sessions at Amann Studios in Vienna. The record occupies a unique area between composition and folk music, classical and jazz/improv, tension and serenity. The design is again from Berlin designer Marion Gerth, previously responsible for the two ErstPop releases.